Genocide in the Bible: does this trouble anyone else?

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Where did you address it?

You asserted that because God creates everything and is omnipotent, God can dispose of creation in any way.
@(name removed by moderator) is showing that isn’t really the case, that God has a nature and can’t contradict God’s own nature, according to the Angelic Doctor.

If that’s the case, how does God most fully reveal that nature?
 
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Ummm, you simply repeated your assertion. That’s not an answer, it’s a stall.
 
Julius_Caesar said:
So Sodom and Gomorrah don’t exist in your view.
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To repeat, Modernity ushered in literalistic approaches to the OT, which was unknown to the church’s first 1500 years of hermeneutics. The patristics and medievals were perfectly at home looking at these stories for the moral/spiritual guidance they’re designed to offer the believing reader.
Julius_Caesar said:
The Crucifixion actually happened did it not?
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Yes, because the non-genocidal-God so loved the world, the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection happened.
Julius_Caesar said:
Yours is a slippery slope.
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Oh, let’s not pretend that what I’m advocating is unique to me. I have the whole of church history on my side, including the greatest minds of the early Fathers and the Middle Ages. It is literalism itself and its odd insistence on OT historicity which is the anomaly.
 
He can, though. He has revealed it through Sacred Scripture 🙂

Like I mean He literally says it 😂

Even the Angelic Doctor says God has ordered death before 🙂

And I would say since those orders come through Sacred Scripture, regardless of if they are literal or not; implies the word of God can indeed command such things!
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But wait, didn’t you say that God can’t make a circle square?
So the fact that God can, or is able to, do anything doesn’t mean the potency is a reality. God’s potency is within God’s revealed nature.

You say that God’s revealed nature is “because it says so in scripture”.
Now you have obvious problems.
 
Magnanimity said:
Oh, let’s not pretend that what I’m advocating is unique to me. I have the whole of church history on my side, including the greatest minds of the early Fathers and the Middle Ages.
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Cherry picking quotes from the above isn’t the same as having them on your side.

In reality, you rely on your tastes to decide what’s literal and what’s.not. You are Modernity personified.
 
And the Angelic Doctor clearly saw these passages as literal.

On the contrary, Augustine says (QQ. in Hept. qu. x super Jos): “Provided the war be just, it is no concern of justice whether it be carried on openly or by ambushes”: and he proves this by the authority of the Lord, Who commanded Joshua to lay ambushes for the city of Hai (Joshua 8:2).
 
He cannot because when he does that it ceased to be a circle and then becomes a square.
goout said:
So the fact that God can, or is able to, do anything doesn’t mean the potency is a reality. God’s potency is within God’s revealed nature.
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His revealed nature is that he can order lives to be taken. It is in both the old and the New Testament 🙂
It was also confirmed by the Church 🙂
goout said:
You say that God’s revealed nature is “because it says so in scripture”.
Now you have obvious problems.
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No I do not 🙂 the Church says exactly the same thing, as (name removed by moderator) pointed out. 🙂
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So you are with the solas, who take the word of God as the sole revelation of God.
Before you claim “the Church” backs you up, you ought to take the writings of the last two Popes on the matter. As has been quoted by magnanimity.
 
The only answer is that the Church approves different interpretations. Both are valid.
 
StudentMI said:
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Julius_Caesar:
God is the Author of Life. He can kill if He wants to.
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Yes he can. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. The issue I have is with having humans to do it for him. Because that means an act we now know to be immoral was moral because God seemingly went outside His nature to order it. Which means God changed.
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This (above) is the problem in a nutshell.

God flooded the world and killed everyone except Noah and his family. Now He either did that or He didn’t. There aren’t any other options. And if God exists and decided to do that then that’s His call. We can accept it as being necessary or we can rail against God for what appears to us to be a monstrous injustice.

The Israelites massacered the Canaanites. Now they did or they didn’t. But…there are other options to be taken if they did. That is, were they just simply following an Israeli policy of scorched earth as far as their enemies were concerned and acted without any command from God OR were they acting according to His will OR (and this is the worrying aspect of it) did they just think they were acting according to His will.

That last option leaves open any act by any group or individual to be justifiably committed (as they see it) as longs as they are absolutely sure in themselves that God has commanded it. Either to them or to someone they trust.

Needless to say, that is an extremely dangerous situation.
 
Freddy said:
Needless to say, that is an extremely dangerous situation.
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Your explanation leaves out several facts.

First, God did this with clear and recognizable signs. No one could see what Moses saw or hear what Moses heard and deny otherwise.

Second it’s not the first time God gave instructions similar to this.

Then the Lord said to Abram: Know for certain that your descendants will reside as aliens in a land not their own, where they shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation they must serve, and after this they will go out with great wealth. In the fourth generation your descendants will return here, for the wickedness of the Amorites is not yet complete.
Genesis 15:13‭-‬14‭, ‬16 NABRE

It’s only dangerous to the reader who finds fault with God.
 
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So we have babies who are ordered to be slaughtered. We also have Catholic teaching, definitive I would say, that genocide is a sin. We also have a God who can not change or positively will evil. So, which is it?
 
Depends on who you ask. The Pope has said the death penalty is no longer right. So, who knows.

I would also mention that the excuse that God knew that the Canaanites babies would grow up to be evil also raises the problem of predestination.
 
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